Penguicon has several other Guests of Honor and there’s a wideranging schedule that includes a bunch of other sessions that could be particularly relevant to geeky feminists, and I’ll mention some here:

Two different feminists I know recently brought my attention to “On the Design of Women’s Spaces” by Kat Marchán, and I’m grateful to them and to Marchán. The essay provides a useful “hierarchy of exclusivity” that helps all of us think about how our feminist spaces — geeky or otherwise — could make sure that our policies, names, and advertising are not accidentally being exclusive.

Recently, while speaking with a group of non-binary folks, a discussion came up about how many of us are uncomfortable in “women’s spaces”. We talked about what these spaces usually intend, how they word things, and how they could align what they want with what they say, in order to get more of us to feel comfortable.

Imagine you have a program, and it has a pretty serious issue. It needs some deep architectural changes to fix it, but you can alleviate some of the symptoms by just changing a few lines of code. You don’t yet know the best way to resolve the larger problem, but you need to do something, so you start with a hack.

… and we’ve started with that hack, and now it’s one that dozens if not hundreds of online and in-person spaces are replicating. I’m glad for tools and examples that help us get past that first initial hack.

We want to be a place where non-binary people and women can make things, learn, and work on projects without fear or intimidation.

It’s one small improvement, and one we’re glad to make. (And we continue to look into more ways — big and small — to be more inclusive, across many axes, and are considering where we’d like to be on Marchán’s hierarchy. Our membership policy evolves as our lead team changes, as our members’ views change, and as we consider new articulations and norms from feminist thinkers.)

Model View Culture’s Queer issue is out! Individual articles will be scattered over the spam over the next week, but check out the whole thing.

FOSS4G — a conference for open source geospatial software, to be held in Portland Oregon in September — is dedicating 50% of their travel grants funding for women and minority attendees. Applications close May 30. They’re also looking for donations to the travel fund; you can donate when you register for the event.

Nerf Rebelle does damage – and not the good kind | Geek In Sydney (May 16): “There’s nothing intrinsic that requires girls to have pink Nerf guns. It’s purely a marketing decision and in my view it’s sad that it works. More importantly, though, every single time we go down this road it’s another brick in the wall that artificially separates girls and boys expectations.”

Ignore data, focus on power | Cathy O’Neil at mathbabe (May 20): “I like data that shines light on powerful people. Like the Sunlight Foundation tracks money and politicians, and that’s good. But I tend to want to protect powerless people, like people who are being surveilled with sensors and their phones. And the thing is, most of the open data focuses on the latter… The power is where the data isn’t.”

Uses and Abuses of Girls | Janet at Dear Author (May 20): “However, the emphasis here is not on content, but on the production of celebrity as a function of teen girl fan loyalty, a commodity generated by these young girls, and then commodified by men and sold back to them in the form of celebrity stand-ins.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, Delicious or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Reason #140 Why Sexist Bullshit in Academia is Not Okay | Isis the Scientist (March 21): “Professor Righetti is continuing to publish his hilarious graphical abstracts and I suspect it is but a matter of time before we get more titties. He is also on the editorial board of several journals, including the journal with his hilarious graphical abstracts. He’s essentially using his leadership to be a huge creeper. Worse, the leadership of the journal is letting it happen.”

Women-only Calls and Non-Binary Authors | Polenth’s Quill (March 3): “I’ve talked before about the issue of non-binary gender in genre. Specifically that it’s difficult when the only gender or sex identity calls going out are for women. […] This doesn’t mean woman-only calls are inherently a problem. Much as it’s not a problem when we have race-specific calls or separate calls for different sexualities. The issue is the woman-only calls don’t happen alongside more general calls for marginalised sex and gender identities. It’s assumed that the way to counteract cis man dominance is to provide opportunities for cis women, rather than to provide opportunities for anyone who isn’t a cis man.”

How to break games out of the “act like a man” box | Dennis Scimeca on ars technica (March 19): “According to the boys Wiseman polled, strong people didn’t “act like a girl.” Being easily upset, awkward, or having disabilities were also things the boys identified as making someone weak. […] Empowerment is tied to “high status” traits like those within the “act like a man” box, but it doesn’t have to mean encouraging players to act like assholes.”

Why I Was Part of Creating a Thing Called Transtech | Lukas Blakk (March 19): “Last night I helped hold the third local meetup of trans and genderqueer people who are interested in getting together to hack on our projects. This is the third event since the amazing Trans*H4CK Hackathon (the first one of its kind!) that took place in October 2013.”

Why I Don’t Want My Daughter to Work in Silicon Valley | Sascha Segan on PCmag (March 17): “[…] we’re talking about my daughter, right? I want her to go somewhere she’s valued, not somewhere she’ll have to fight every day against forces trying to grind her down. Yes, that’s what billions of people struggling on this earth do daily, but the goal of civilization is to lessen that particular struggle. I want her to live a life where kindness and understanding are important. And if she chooses tech, fortunately, she’ll have options.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, Delicious or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).